Facebook Is Killing Your Battery and You Know It

You don’t need lengthy tutorials and guides to save some battery life

Facebook battery meter

Former Apple Genius Scotty Loveless has outed a mile-long blog post about iOS battery drainage and what you can do to fix it. In a nutshell, you shouldn’t be waiting for Apple to address this problem for you, and one major culprit is actually Facebook, not iOS itself.

Loveless got an iPhone 5s recently and he immediately noticed that his mileage was not exactly spectacular. So he tethered it to a Mac and ran Instruments from Xcode to diagnose all the processes running on it, including “how much memory and processing power each app is using in real-time.”

“During this testing, Facebook kept jumping up on the process list even though I wasn't using it,” Loveless explains. “So I tried disabling Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook, and you'll never guess what happened: my battery percentage increased. It jumped from 12% to 17%.”

Disabling Location Services and Background App Refresh for Facebook is actually just one of the many tips he offers to solve iOS battery drainage. You can visit the guy’s blog (overthought.org) and check out the rest of the tips, or see our coverage that compresses the key points in about 500 words.

On the topic of Facebook eating your battery life, you don’t need an Apple Genius to tell you that the social network consumes our phones’ resources as much as it consumes our souls.

As you can imagine, constantly checking every status, like, link, photo, video, or break-up will not help the situation. If the screen is on, the battery will drain. It’s that simple. The saddest part is that everyone already knows all this yet still complains about their battery draining like crazy.

Note: I’m not talking about those isolated cases where something is clearly wrong as the battery meter drops one percent every minute. I’m talking about first-world-problem crybabies, who make up the majority of the people building up hype about a problem that might not be as widespread as you’d think.

Loveless speculates that Facebook is “abusing the fact that they have VOIP call features to run in the background more than they should.” His speculation is most likely accurate. Why do you think Facebook paid the price of a small country to own WhatsApp?

Their “world domination” plans include, among other things, a worldwide communications network that does voice, video, and media. Heck, most of it is already here, just not in a form we’re ready to use for regular phone calls.

Facebook also bought Oculus Rift, a potent nugget of VR technology that will completely immerse us into the social network. Put a calling feature on that thing and you’ll be able to invite virtually (and I mean virtually) anyone from across the world into your living room. In a virtual manner, of course.

So the next time you’re wondering what’s draining your iPhone’s battery, remember to first and foremost admit that you’re obsessed with Facebook.

Then, try to decide if it’s actually necessary to upload a ten-page rant on Apple’s forums about how the company doesn’t care about the customers who paid hundreds of dollars for a device that’s inferior to everything else and that you’re going to switch to Android if the company doesn’t issue a patch.

And for conspiracy advocates who think Apple is engaging in planned obsolescence with poor battery life, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Battery life is the last thing Apple wants to decay when it takes it upon itself to replace phones that exhibit a persistent issue, free of charge.